Reinventing Multi-Floor Factories: Sustainability-Driven Integrated Planning Process to Mitigate Soil Sealing

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a planning process tailored to address the unique challenges of multi-floor factories, providing practitioners with valuable guidance for their design tasks. Recognizing the critical role of factories in sustainable development, this work addresses their potential to drive economic growth while advancing ecological and social sustainability. Traditional expansion strategies often result in increased soil sealing, adversely affecting agricultural productivity and food security. Our approach seeks to decouple economic growth from land use by incorporating specific considerations for multi-floor factory design into a structured planning process. We analyze the implications of multi-floor buildings on the planning parameters for factories, evaluating the suitability of existing planning methods. Based on our analysis, we propose necessary advancements to these methods and integrate them into a comprehensive new planning framework. The proposed process is a first attempt to encourage practitioners to adopt multi-floor factory designs and lays the groundwork for future research to further refine and validate these methods in real-world applications.